John Williams’ Stoner has unexpectedly become a bestseller in Europe, but the work remains largely unknown in its own country. In “The Greatest American Novel You’ve Never Heard Of,” New Yorker contributor Tim Kreider explores the reasons why Williams has been “consigned to that unenviable category inhabited by such august company as Richard Yates and James Salter: the writer’s writer.”
Stoner is undeniably a great book, but I can also understand why it isn’t a sentimental favorite in its native land. You could almost describe it as an anti-“Gatsby”
